Hack a Day

Turn your old hard drive into a sander/grinder

Will O'Brien — 2008-06-27T15:40:00+00:00

Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

[Jipa] over at MetkuMods put up an original re-use for old hard drives: make em into power tools. The tiny servo motor that drives the spindle doesn't generate much torque, but once the drive is spinning fast enough, the inertial force of the platter is enough to make it usable for small grinding/sanding projects. The platters are re-stacked directly on top of each other to increase strength - we'd suggest a few dabs of epoxy to make em even stronger. Once stacked, a piece of sand paper is cut to size and held on by the center platter washer. [Via hacknmod]

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Open source data recovery tools

Eliot Phillips — 2008-06-24T19:30:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks, security hacks

InformationWeek has great article on open source data recovery tools. What type of tools you use will depend on the severity of the situation. You can use live Linux distros designed for recovery like SystemRescueCD or Partedmagic (the latter being more user friendly). Security tools distrubutions like BackTrack can also be helpful; Helix in particular was designed for forensics work. dd is a standard *nix tool for imaging drives, but something like TestDisk can help you repair partition tables for whole disk recovery. Most deletion operations don't overwrite the data which means you can use file carving to capture the lost files. PhotoRec is able to find files in a number of common formats. Finally, if you've got some serious forensic work ahead of you there's The Sleuth Kit and many other command line tools.

As an addendum, OStatic put together a list of 5 freeware tools for protecting your system.

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Eee PC 1000H dissected

Juan Aguilar — 2008-06-22T23:55:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

The people at TweakTown completely disassembled a new Eee PC 1000H and documented the entire process. Aside from showing you the side effects of too much tech fetish and not enough regular fetish, the article reveals all the parts of the new Eee, with a few surprises inside. Although it's an Eee PC, it's very different from all of its predecessors.

One of the things the teardown shows is that several parts are far more modular than previous Eee PC models. The hard drive, for example, is a standard Seagate Momentus which is made for desktop systems; it can easily be swapped out. Another easily swapped component is the 1GB SIMM from ASint.

Although their (ahem) stripping process was a bit unconventional, a lot of interesting information was yielded from this teardown. Keep 'em coming, TweakTown, just be sure to clean off your tool when you're done.

[via Gizmodo]

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Eee PC 901 teardown

Eliot Phillips — 2008-06-17T21:55:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

The folks from bit-tech have done us a great service by tearing open the Eee PC 901. Under the keyboard is a large metal plate that acts as the processor's heat sink. The 4GB SSD card is not soldered to the board this time around. There is some empty space labeled IDE3 and solder points that say 3GCard, which definitely deserve further investigation. The oddest thing they found was a button with no indication to its purpose. It looks like a good machine and we hope to see more Eee PC hacks in the future.

[via Engadget]

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Speed testing the latest web browsers

Eliot Phillips — 2008-06-13T14:30:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

With the imminent release of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 being finalized this week, Lifehacker decided it was a good time to run the browsers head to head to see which was the fastest and least resource intensive. The testing system was a 2GHz 2GB Vista machine. The timing system used wasn't directly hooked to the browser, so tests were repeated multiple times to improve accuracy. The cold start winner was Opera, but most browsers opened in about a second if they had been run recently. Safari did well loading content in multiple tabs at the same time, probably due to its short render times for JavaScript and CSS. The final test was memory usage; we're sure many people will be happy to know that Firefox 3 RC3 only used 66% of the RAM required by the other three browsers.

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EFiX boots Leopard retail DVDs on generic hardware

Eliot Phillips — 2008-06-12T23:40:00+00:00

Filed under: macs hacks, pcs hacks

On June 23rd, EFiX is planning on releasing a USB dongle that will let any PC boot and install OSX from a retail DVD. The commercial device is supposed to take care of all patching and other woes OSX86 enthusiasts have had to deal with. Very little information is provided other than a statement that the development process took a lot of time and that they overcame "sabotage"... so, it's got that going for it. Major OSX86 contributor (and Psystar hater) [Netkas] received a device to test and was pleased with the results. We're just going to wait and see what happens. Not that it matters; they have no plans of releasing it in the US.

[via InsanelyMac]
[photo: Mario Seekr]

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Synaptics trackpad swap

Will O'Brien — 2008-06-11T08:04:00+00:00

Filed under: laptops hacks, pcs hacks, daily

Some people are really picky about their trackpads. [John] posted a guide on retrofitting a Synaptics pad in place of the newer, but less user friendly ALPS touchpad/stick combo used in the Dell Inspiron 8200. On the opposite end, [C. Järnåker], loves laptop keyboards enough to mod them for use on his desktop machine.

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Touchscreen kit for Eee PC

Juan Aguilar — 2008-06-01T22:15:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

We've featured hacks for the Eee PC 701 before, but nothing so easy as this touchscreen kit.

This kit includes everything needed: the touchpanel, a USB controller card, and the correct connectors. The touchpanel is placed inside the frame in front of the screen. The controller is plugged in line with the USB webcam. This mod can be completely installed in 9 steps, the hardest of which involves removing a few screws. This is great solution for first-time modders, but if you're not afraid of a little solder and prefer a bit more challenge, check out jkkmobile's original touchscreen hack. He even hints that he's successfully added touch to his Eee 900 as well.

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Open graphics card available for preorder

Eliot Phillips — 2008-05-21T15:00:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks, daily

The Open Graphics Project has started accepting preorders for their OGD1, a graphics card with a completely open source design. This initial release is billed as a high-end FPGA prototyping kit specifically designed to test computer graphics architectures. The card has two DVI connectors, S-Video, 256MB RAM, and a 64bit PCI-X connector. The core of the system is a Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA. A nonvolatile Lattice XP10 FPGA is used to bootstrap the Xilinx at power up. Here's the layout of the specific components.

An open design like this could prove very beneficial to the free software community. The open hardware makes driver development much easier; binary drivers from traditional graphics manufacturers have been very hard to work with in the past. The OGD1 could also be used with CPU architectures that wouldn't be unsupported by normal graphics cards. An FPGA based design means that CPU intensive processes like video decoding could be offloaded to the video card without needing a dedicated chip. There is still a lot of work to be done and at $1500 we're pretty sure most of you won't be buying the first generation. It's still exciting to see traditional PC hardware getting reinvented and opened up. Check out the OGD1's FAQ for more info.

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Buy Ben's PS3 Laptop

Will O'Brien — 2008-04-25T12:07:00+00:00

Filed under: laptops hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

Just a little public service message: If you've been drooling over [Ben]'s work and have plenty of loose change, his PS3 laptop is up for auction to benefit the National Cancer Coalition.

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24 core Ikea cluster

Will O'Brien — 2008-04-23T21:11:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

[Janne] does freelance animation and wanted something with a bit more CPU to get his rendering jobs done. He picked up an Ikea 'Helmer' cabinet and refitted it to hold six Intel quad cores, six Gigabyte motherboards with 8GB of ram each and six 400 watt power supplies. He seems happy with it - I think it just needs some custom power wiring and an integrated Gig-E switch to achieve perfection. What? I'm not jealous at all.

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DIY iMac Mini

Will O'Brien — 2008-04-14T05:10:00+00:00

Filed under: laptops hacks, macs hacks, pcs hacks

[Phyro-Mane] sent in his home built iMac mini. He based it on an old laptop with an install of ~~OSX86~~ XP with a mac theme. The forum is in German, but the photos in the thread speak for themselves.

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DIY PC gaming gun

Will O'Brien — 2008-04-10T23:59:00+00:00

Filed under: home entertainment hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

[rustlabs] put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.

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laser-writing via vnc

Will O'Brien — 2008-03-11T15:40:00+00:00

Filed under: laser hacks, pcs hacks

Writing with a laser pointer has been done, but [Chris]'s roll your own version feeds the data the display pc using VNC. He's got some speed issues, but I'm giving him points for most original use for remote desktop software.

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Bootable USB RAM capture

Will O'Brien — 2008-03-03T22:17:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

Inspired by some research done at princeton (looks like the original site is down), [Wesley] sent in his version of a bootable RAM dumping USB drive, complete with a how-to on rolling your own. He put together a utility that runs under syslinux to capture the data, installed it to a USB thumb drive and managed to create a device that will boot on a machine and copy the contents of the RAM before it's overwritten by another utility.

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Breaking disk encryption with RAM dumps

Eliot Phillips — 2008-02-21T15:12:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks

If you haven't gotten a chance yet, do watch the video of this attack. It's does a good job explaining the problem. Full drive encryption stores the key in RAM while the computer is powered on. The RAM's stored data doesn't immediately disappear when powered off, but fades over time. To recover the keys, they powered off the computer and booted from a USB disk that created an image of the RAM. You can read more about the attack here.

How can you reduce this threat? You can turn off USB booting and then put a password on the BIOS to prevent the specific activity shown in the video. Also, you can encrypt your rarely used data in a folder on the disk. They could still decrypt the disk, but they won't get everything. I don't think this problem will truly be fixed unless there is a fundamental change in hardware design to erase the RAM and even then it would probably only help computers that are powered off, not suspended.

The potential for this attack has always been talked about and I'm glad to see someone pull it off. I'm hoping to see future research into dumping RAM data using a USB/ExpressCard with DMA access.

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Window unit turned PC Water cooler

Will O'Brien — 2008-02-11T22:42:00+00:00

Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks

I almost passed this one up because it was shotgunned across a few blogs, but it would be a shame to pass up on a good hack. [Mike] decided to use a standard window AC unit to cool the CPU in his rig. The A/C unit was modified to place the evaporation coil inside a fish tank filled with glycol/water antifreeze coolant. To cool the CPU, he used a normal water block, but insulated the coolant lines between the cooling unit and the machine. That should give you the idea. For more details, have fun deciphering his project in pictures. [via]

Bonus: [Johnny] sent in the NASA workmenship guide. It's pretty interesting to see what the space boys require for their electronics work.

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eeePC inverse video scaling

Will O'Brien — 2008-02-10T21:51:00+00:00

Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks

[Tracker] sent in this handy software hack for the eeePC. The idea is to scale higher resolutions like 1024x768 down to the native 800x480 screen resolution. His post tells you how (but requires windows) and helpfully provides the required downloadable driver. I wonder if he's seen this video showing up 1600x900?
(update: fixed the missing video link.)

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Replace your LCD power supply

Will O'Brien — 2008-01-27T01:11:00+00:00

Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

[Computer Guru]'s LCD power supply went out, making it a useless pile of plastic. He used an old computer PSU to replace the defective one. After he identified the outputs on the built-in supply (The one's I've pulled apart were labelled) he stripped down the replacement PSU to provide the necessary voltages.

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24th Anniversary Macintosh

Will O'Brien — 2008-01-13T23:57:00+00:00

Filed under: macs hacks, misc hacks, pcs hacks

[Dave] sent in his retro Mac project. Putting new guts into an old mac isn't really unheard of, but I liked his solution to use the original Mac 512k keyboard and mouse. He used an Atmel AT90USB162 to create his own standard USB HID device. The keyboard and mouse appear as a standard USB device, so the mac (or any modern USB PC) can identify use the keyboard and mouse without any additional software.

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